EdTech has some accounting to do now that major questions about the place of technology and screens in are being heavily scrutinized.
It is a time for the Ed Tech field to come to a reckoning.
Instead of acting like dogmatic, fundamentalists defending their technology tenants of faith, those in the field of Ed Tech should be engaging in mass self-criticism and self-examination, focusing on everything they have taken for granted since they first pushed devices into the schools.
Some thoughts on what those should be?
For example, Ed Tech has always had an extremely cozy relationship with those who create and sale the gadgets (and I use that word to broadly cover everything, computers to AI). These companies sponsor Ed Tech conventions, and Ed Tech has allowed them free uncritical access to all the educators attending. At these events they give attendees free gifts and subject them to company delivered or sponsored keynote addresses. They provide “free” training on their products. Not one minute is devoted to critical thinking about the products peddled.
In this way, Ed Tech has allowed the product companies to control the discourse and the discipline. Leaders controlling the budgets who really do not understand the technologies are sold on these, then Ed Tech jumps on board and tries to justify the purchase. This should not be.
Ed Tech needs to develop a conscience. It needs a “critical mind” that looks upon its discipline with skeptical, questioning eyes.
Instead, we salespeople are allowed to promote unquestioningly their wares, and then, we horrifyingly, subject our students to these. Use now and ask questions later with no regard of the effects on our students is sometimes the thinking.
Is it any wonder, that these devices and gadgets have sometimes caused much harm and little good?
Joseph Weizenbaum, computer scientist and pioneer thinker about AI, once wrote:
“There are certain tasks which computers ought not be made to do, independent of whether computers can be made to do them.”
This statement, the field of Ed Tech does not get. It sees their devices as always the answer. They are most often “pure technology solutionists,” who look for problems to solve with their tools, instead of looking at the problems and then trying to find the tool to solve them. Maybe sometimes, even inventing problems in order to use their gadgets to solve them.
That’s why they always see their devices as the answer to every educational problem.
But here’s the rub: As Weizenbaum points out, just because a computer, a smart phone, or AI can do it, that does not mean we should use them to do it.
In these times, Ed Tech as a field would do well to reflect critically on itself.
Instead of a field that acts as a conduit to pipe gadgets into the classroom and schools marketed to them by tech companies, Ed Tech educators need to begin asking questions like these:
-Is this something I want technology to do?
-Is it something technology should be doing?
-Is it just possible, that this learning, this teaching, this task would be best achieved through analog means?
Asking such critical questions, and being skeptical and critical of technology would perhaps give this field the beginnings of some kind of conscience. It would upset the uncritical value tech has and decenter it in the field of education, which is what should happen.
If Ed Tech educators had become critical and skeptical about the role of gadgets in the classroom from the beginning, instead of being awestricken by the glow of the devices, this might have also headed off the push to limit screens in schools because educators would have been more discerning before subjecting children to devices in their Ed Tech experiments.
